“Commercial building automation,” or “commercial automation,” refers to the use of computer and information technology to control commercial building systems, such as lighting, HVAC, audio-visual, smoke detection, security, and shading, among others. Using specialized hardware and control logic, building devices can monitor their environment and can be controlled automatically. Although commercial automation has been available at some level of sophistication for some time, it steadily becomes more practical, from both a technological and cost perspective.
A sophisticated commercial automation and control system might include sensors (e.g., of temperature, of light, of motion, etc.), controllers (e.g., a general-purpose personal computer, a dedicated automation controller, etc.), and actuators or actors (e.g., motorized valves, switches, etc.). The system might also include a human-machine interface device that enables an occupant of the building to interact with the system. The interface can be a specialized terminal or an application (“app”) running on a smartphone or tablet computer. The various system devices communicate over dedicated wiring, or over a wired network, or wirelessly, using one or more protocols.
Lighting automation and control systems now exist in which luminaires that comprise sensors, lamps, and control logic are networked together, in what is sometimes referred to as “connected lighting” or networked “smart lighting.” In such a network, sensors which can be standalone and/or integrated into the luminaire nodes collect data about the local environment, such as data related to ambient lighting in the vicinity of the luminaires. The networked luminaires communicate with one another, in some cases sharing the sensor data, and adjust the light output of the lamps via the control logic, with some level of coordination across the networked luminaires.
FIG. 1 depicts connected lighting network 100 in the prior art. Network 100 comprises smart nodes 101-1 through 101-M, wherein M is a positive integer (e.g., M being equal to 5 as depicted, etc.). As depicted in FIG. 1, the nodes are luminaires (denoted by “L”). Additionally, each of the luminaires comprises an ambient light sensor. The networked nodes communicate wirelessly with one another via transmitted signals 102-1, 102-2, 102-3, 102-4, and 102-5. The group of nodes can be situated within a building or other structure.
Network 100 is a mesh data network that enables communication among smart nodes 101-1 through 101-M. To this end, the nodes within network 100 distribute data (e.g., the packet-based messages, etc.) in accordance with Bluetooth mesh networking. A “mesh network” is a network topology in which each node relays data for the network. The nodes that are involved cooperate in the distribution of data in the network.
Being a mesh network, network 100 is an example of a distributed control system. Distributed control systems have some advantages over centralized control systems, including in some cases the elimination of a single point of failure and the reduction of processor load. Furthermore, technologies such as Bluetooth mesh networking can enable a single, published message to be processed by more than one network node; for example, each sensor data message can be acted upon by more than one node.